Correct Answer - Option 1 : Propositional thought
Jean Piaget viewed children as little scientists who actively engaged with their environment and constructed their own understanding. He saw cognitive development as a process with discreet stages, with each stage corresponding to the attainment of superior cognitive skills. He has stated four stages of cognitive development.
Formal Operational Stage (11 + years through adulthood): It is the last stage of Piaget's cognitive development. According to Piaget, adolescents have entered the formal operational stage. Individuals attain many abilities in this stage as Deductive reasoning, Abstract or propositional thought, Metacognition, Systematic problem-solving, and hypothetico-deductive reasoning.
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Abstract or propositional thought- The ability to conceptualize and evaluate concepts that are outside the bounds of objective, testable reality. Before this stage individuals deal with concrete things.
- This stage opens up the possibility for them to mentally manipulate intangible things like – being able to recognize patterns in a random set, being able to formulate theories, being able to understand multiple underlying meanings in a single statement.
- For instance, the child at this stage would be able to understand that when asked not to play for too long because it is “bad” is an idea that can be challenged; that playing isn’t inherently bad as long as the homework is finished and it isn’t unsafe.
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Sensorimotor Period (0-2 years) Goal-directed behavior, Experimentation Mental combinations, and problem-solving
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Pre-operational stage (2-7 years)Transitive inference- It is a form of deductive reasoning that allows one to derive a relation between items that have not been notably compared before. In a general form, the transitive inference is the ability to deduce that if Item X is related to Item Y and Item Y is related to Item Z, then Item X must be related to Item Z.
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Concrete operational period (7-11 years) Cognitive Process are Logical operations applied to concrete problems, Decentration, Conservation, Seriation, Numeration
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Cognitive Mapping: Piaget advocated that schemes are the mental representations or maps of the world.
Hence, we can conclude that According to Piaget, adolescents' ability to evaluate the logic of verbal statements without referring to real-world circumstances is Propositional thought.
